Philippe Gronon has exhibited widely in Europe in solo shows at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (1997), Centre Régional d'art Contemporain, Montbéliard, France (2001), and Mamco Geneva (2003), and in group exhibitions, including La Force de l'Art and Grand Palais (2006), and Centre Pompidou (2006 and 2007). While extremely detailed, Gronon's images are conceptual in their abstraction of comm...[more]

Interview with Philippe Gronon

ArtSlant's writer, Frances Guerin met with Philippe Gronon at the Galerie Dominique Fiat in Paris. Gronon's exhibition, Verso, had just opened. They walked through the exhibit and talked about Philippe's style of working, his influences and his ideas about coincidence.

Frances Guerin: Can you tell us about your experience at art school? Your professors? Your influences?

Philippe Gronon: At this time, Christian Bernard was director of La Villa Arson - today he directs the Mamco in Geneva - and he was very important for me, as he was for many others of my generation: for example, Ghada Amer, Tatiana Trouvé, Philippe Mayaux, Philippe Ramette, Pascal Pinaud. In particular, he stressed the breakdown of the distinction between various media practices, and this was the motivating principle, and primary concern of his artistic project.

FG: What made you choose photography as a medium? How or what does it achieve for you that other media don't?

PG: Photography very quickly attracted me because of its relationship to distance. With photography I was able to stand back and to conceive my work very precisely, to see it evolve, and to construct it slowly.

FG: In talking about your work, you mentioned Pandora's box. The "box"(actually a jar) carried by Pandora contained all the evils of mankind - greed, vanity, slander, lying, envy, pining, as well as hope. What secrets does your work hide? How and where do you see the viewer's participation in unearthing the secrets?

PG: For me, the idea of Pandora's box has a much larger sense than the original one of what is contained in the box. Specifically, what is contained in the box reflects back directly on the spectator, and his or her own interpretation (to each his box!) Or perhaps I should have spoken of a launch pad for the imaginationas opposed to Pandora's box ...I ask more questions with this work than I give answers!

FG: In choosing your subject matter, you create situations where there is a challenge before you can start photographing: entry into museum vaults, access to banks, private buildings, and so on. How does this sense of "that which cannot easily be accessed" transfer to the photograph?

PG: It's not true for all the works: the sheet film holders, the piles of manure, the sand castles, the match box towers do not conform to this rule. But it is true that for the majority of the other series, their realization depends on authorizations which are sometimes very difficult to obtain. This is directly linked to my artistic approach, and in turn, this approach appropriates the familiar principles of photography : the investigation, the making contact, the discovery of a universe, and my intervention into the discourses of the places where I find these targetted objects. The places are important because they are, at the same time, present in the light that they reflect, and that enables the objects to be seen, and to be photographed - remembering that there is no artifice illumination on my part. The places are also absent, due to the abstraction of the objects that results from my cropping of the photographs.

On the ambivalence of the work (which is its strong point), the works are, at the same time, hyper-real because they adopt the most precise principle of a perfect reproduction. They are also, totally abstract because they are not only taken out the original context, but also thanks to this précision written across the surface of the image, they are bizzarely abstract.

FG: Both you and Vik Muniz opened exhibitions on the same day, with the title of Verso. Muniz in New York; you in Paris. You both represent the backs of paintings. The obvious difference is that Muniz reconstructs the object, and you photograph it. What are some of the other ways your work is conceptually different from Muniz's? What do you think about this coincidence?

PG: It is very strange and troubling, as are all chance events, everywhere. What else can I say ? However, my versos and those of Vik Muniz only appear identicial because they have a common goal to show the back of a painting ...

But our two artistic propositions are conceptually very different. In effect, Vik Muniz represents the objects themselves. He employs artisans who make « a copy » of a verso in three dimensions. We are not, in this case, dealing with the représentation of the real, but with its interprétation, even if the works want or claim to be as neutral as possible. While they claim to be a very precise replica of the original object, they are actually very remote from this claim.

For my versos, as is the case for my previous photographic series, the principle is something else since my photographs are, in essence, a recording of the real, and not copies or simulacres of versos.

But I think it would instead be very interesting, given that the the current exhibitions with the same title, Verso, that simultaneously show an apparently strong resemblance and an important conceptual gap, if Vik Muniz and I were able to work on a joint exhibition.

ArtSlant would like to thank Philippe Gronon for his assistance in making this interview possible.